Many consider it sacred ground.
A jewel in the crown of the Craggies, the Reems Creek Valley’s pristine Laurel
Fork shelters primeval hemlock and tulip poplar. And a tribe still exists that
will tell you the place changed their lives forever.

Camp Sequoyah, once one of
America’s top summer youth camps, now lives only in memory. The Grand Council
Ring—where as a boy I “Indian-danced” around glorious tribal fires—has become a
nursery to 12-foot beeches, buckeyes and poison ivy. But a determined group of
ex-Sequoyans is mounting a campaign to save the camp from the developer’s
‘dozer, and to resurrect its founders’ vision.

It’s eerie. Even after 15 years
of disuse, there’s something indescribably alive at Sequoyah. In a 1949 article
marking the camp’s 25th
anniversary, the Asheville News reported sensing something “intangible
and at the same time substantial and permanent.” The glowing energy that
enthralled so many campers still raises the hair on your arms—the spirit of Camp
Sequoyah sleeping, just waiting to be revived.

Just beyond Beech Community, 17
miles northeast of Asheville, the campus site now sits abandoned, visited only
by a steady stream of old Sequoyans, determined to rediscover and preserve, the
cradle of their characters, the place where they grew up. One such pilgrim,
acclaimed North Carolina writer Reynolds Price, introduced me—by way of his 1990
novel The Tongues of Angels—to the camp’s founder, a man whose vision
touched thousands. I’d heard so much about him, the longtime “Chief” of Camp
Sequoyah who “blazed like a nova” and passed away when I was only one year
old—C. Walton Johnson, my grandfather.

More recently, Price commented
on what he called “the altogether unlikely miracle that [my grandparents] worked
continuously and for so long at Sequoyah, “cultivating men of destiny.” Fun,
prank-filled, hallowed and inspiring, a summer at the camp named after the
inventor of Cherokee writing left an indelible mark on the souls of her
tribesmen. In his fictional account, “firmly socketed in the whole Sequoyah
world,” Price pays homage to that remarkable place that left its imprint on his
and so many other souls.

The story of my grandfather’s
life-long quest to nurture others by upright example, and to teach that we are
indeed our brother’s keepers, is in itself inspirational. On Aug. 5, 1906, while
waiting on a train that would take him to Buie’s Creek Academy (now Campbell
College), the 23-year-old Johnson jotted in his diary, “Strive! Strive and push
forward! The glorious goal hoped for is reached only by the most strenuous
efforts and lasting perseverance . . . .The noblest question in the world: What
good can I do in it?”

A camp with a purpose

In 1923, while teaching high
school in Asheville and working with the YMCA, Johnson was convinced by a fellow
Rotarian that running a summer camp was the ideal vehicle for ministering to
youth—for making, not money, but men.

Back from the front-line
trenches of France, and newly wed, he drove his cranky Model T up into the hills
of Buncombe County and happened upon a true beauty spot, an apple orchard,
overgrown with bramble briars, once Cherokee territory. He talked his bride,
Kitty Poole Johnson, into abandoning the city and her career as a professional
musician and moving into an isolated, primitive cottage. With a broad axe, an
iron will and lots of local supporters (it is said that at one time or another
he employed the whole community), Johnson began to hew the cabins that would
become North Carolina’s first private camp for boys—Camp Sequoyah, “A Camp With
A Purpose.”

Twenty-seven boys arrived in
June of ’24 to test Johnson’s letterhead promise that Sequoyah would teach them
“to see with their hearts, do with their hands, and live together in a spirit of
brotherhood.” They quickly realized this camp was not merely a vacation
solution, but a place, as Johnson said, “to pit strength against the elements,
and to match wits with the cunning of wild life of the forests—[while
developing] self-reliance and resourcefulness . . . .” Sequoyah was also where
many heard of environmentalism for the first time, as they learned to harmonize
nature and humankind.

What happened was nothing short
of phenomenal. Pioneering programs in woodcraft and Native American lore
attracted national attention. Being child-centered, such programs fostered more
than skills; personal growth and character development formed the measuring
stick of success. Special guests, including writers Earnest Thompson Seton and
South Carolina Poet Laureate Archibald Rutledge and the magnanimous Red Dawn,
chief of the Sioux, visited to lend their stature. Boys from across the country
and sea adopted the camp as a summer home, leaving by the end of each August a
bit stronger and wiser, inspired by nature’s beauty and the new-found potential
within them.

Of the summer of ’53, Price
comments: “The 10 weeks laid deep foundations in me. . . the credible gravity
with which Chief and Mike Hoffman and Red Dawn moved us toward an astonishingly
rich and (in American history) premature but enduring sense of the fragility of
the natural world. Above all, they led us to see ourselves as brief components
of that world, not its masters—and components with endless hard duties for
which, however, the reward was joy.”

At age 80, in his 43rd year as
Sequoyah’s Chief, C. Walton Johnson fell victim to a fatal heart attack,
bequeathing to his children a legacy nonpareil. One must wonder what Chief would
think if he knew his Elysium now lies fallow. The new owners kept Sequoyah
running for a decade, but when managerial disputes festered in 1978, they locked
a gate across her drive, and Sequoyah’s 50 buildings—the Nature Den, once the
one-room home of the Scotsman who settled McDaris Cove 150 years ago; the
Retreat, another hand-hewn structure, originally the home of a missionary in the
Cane Creek Valley; the cabin that came from Big Tom Wilson’s place in Yancey
County—all commenced to rot.

A spiritual mission

Enter Sequoyah Center, Inc., a
dedicated group of alumni and friends bent on purchasing, restoring and
reopening Camp Sequoyah. But with at least a million dollars to be raised,
playing deus ex machina is not easy.

The project evolved
spontaneously, catalyzed by old Sequoyans like Nashville musician Garrett
Randolph, who claims he is “not wlling to surrender Camp Sequoyah either to
termites or developers.” He stirred Thomas Graham of Denver, an old camper who
had been “haunted positively” by Sequoyah for years. They teamed up with others,
registered a non-profit corporation, and recently revived “The Thunderbird,”
Sequoyah’s old newsletter, in an urgent attempt to reach alumni and potential
patrons before it’s too late.

“It’s a spiritual mission,”
explains Graham passionately. Chief Johnson, says Graham, was the most
influential figure in his life’s development.

Preserving the undeveloped
land, now up for sale, is of primary importance. One hundred fifty pristine
acres strewn with huge-waisted hemlocks and towering tulip poplars backed up
against the Woodfin watershed and Blue Ridge Parkway: “It’s a natural resource
that must be saved at any cost,” Graham proclaims.

A positive response from the
local community has reinforced Sequoyah Center’s aim. “So many people out here
don’t want to see the land sold and developed,” says Caroline Daszewski,a
retired school teacher who has lived in Beech Community off and on for 18 years.
“The community is supportive morally and physically,” she adds, noting that
opening up the camp would breathe new life into more than just the campus.

Price, one of the dozens
involved with the Center, agrees that getting Sequoyah back is more than just a
healthy proposition: “America needs everything it can get in the way of serious
attention to young people. Chief’s basic thrust of developing better human
beings is absolutely necessary to America and the human species.”

When writing The Tongues of
Angels, Price made his way back to Sequoyah after an absence of 35 years and
found more than bats roosting in his old cabin: “ . . . despite the overgrowth
of cedars, the rotting roofs and reduced lake. . . I found the heart of the
place entirely alive and waiting for a vision as strong and benign as Chief’s.”

If the Sequoyah Center proves
successful in its bid to buy the camp, it won’t be long before the rills of
laughter once again rise to the surrounding pinnacles of Bald Knob, Snowball and
Mt. Mitchell, and a heritage as rich as the mountains themselves will live on.
But for now, one must listen carefully to hear it. . . the rhythmic thump of the
tom-tom, the heartbeat of Camp Sequoyah—echoing silently among the hemlocks.

_______________________________________

Contributed by Betty Chamberlain, a good
friend of Sequoyah. Betty writes:

I have attached a piece written nine
years ago by Walton Conway, Karen Johnson Conway's second son, then an aspiring
writer but now owner, with a partner in Russia, of
The Golden
Cockerel, an importing business in Boone.

I suspect that the words written in Chief's diary are quoted from Thomas
Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, for they are typical of what Herr Teufelsdroch
("Mr. Stuff and Nonsense") says throughout that fascinating sermon/novel. I know
that Chief was greatly inspired by Thomas Carlyle (though he had no respect for
his wife, the "blue stocking" Jane Welsh Carlyle). Love of Carlyle's writing is
one of the interests that cemented the life-long friendship between my father
and Chief; indeed, one of my prized possessions is a worn, eternally dusty copy
of Sartor, "and George E. Simmons" written in faded ink on the title page after
"by Thomas Carlyle."

Alas, Sequoyah Center
came to naught.
But Walton Conway would
be gratified to know, that a decade after he wrote the above tribute,
there are still those who endeavor to preserve the Sequoyah legacy, both
physically and spiritually,
not the least of whom are its current owners.